


black roses red

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-14
Updated: 2008-07-14
Packaged: 2018-10-16 00:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: the sea doesn't want him to be alone either.





	

"O summer day beside the joyous sea!  
O summer day so wonderful and white,  
So full of gladness and so full of pain!  
Forever and forever shalt thou be  
To some the gravestone of a dead delight,  
To some the landmark of a new domain."  
\- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Heal me from all this sorrow as I let you go. I will find my way; I will sacrifice. Now I’m living in your afterglow. Bathed in blue, the walls of my memory divide the thorns from the roses. It’s you who is closest.” – INXS, “Afterglow”

  
The sea does not know how sad she can seem.

She breaks and swells, laughs and sighs, and every moment there is life, teeming within her. She is happy for the things that are simple and quiet and well-known: birth and death, the patterns of the natural world. She believes, as once a young man did, in the power of God to create logical things, in the symmetry of a nautilus shell and the geometry of coral, though she knows not the words to name it. The sea does not wish to limit God, in any case.

But the joy within the sea does not reach the cliff, where a suited, squinting man stands staring into the sunset. He hears the sighs and not the laughter; understands the death and not the birth. This man is built for the sadness, for the memories of past lovers that drift through his mind. A woman, and a man, and a fight. The sea only sees how deeply he cares.

He lets the twilight drift over his hair, silvering it with moonlight. In a few years he will not need the moonlight to make it silver; it will do that on its own. Already his body is telling him this. It sags a little, it cannot keep up with the younger of his colleagues, it is failing him in small ways – a forgotten fact, a lost focus. Everything he knows is falling to pieces, and the thoughts of his longing – for one more chance, for just a little more time – echoes louder than does his breath.

The sea does not know any of this, but when she sees him standing on the cliffs she knows that there is something within this man worth remembering. She folds his darkness into her own and lets him taste the secrets of her fathoms in his every breath of salt air and brine. She gives herself up to the man on the cliff, the man whose end bothers him not for his own sake, but for another’s.

Her endlessness. Her breathlessness. Her ruthlessness. They all belong to the man in the suit.

And when he dies, and he will die soon, she will surge within him again.

What happens next is anyone’s guess.  



End file.
